Feedback and Appreciation at Work

Appreciation and feedback at work could barely be more popular at the moment. In particular, practical recommendations stress the effectiveness of appreciation and feedback in boosting employee motivation and performance, and provide specific suggestions on how they should be applied at work. The aim of this dissertation is to scrutinize some of the practical recommendations on appreciation and feedback in the context of existing theories and empirical results, and to put these recommendations to an empirical test. The first part of this research focused on the practical recommendation to boost employee motivation and performance with appreciation by investigating whether the effects of appreciation are as positive as commonly assumed. We used social exchange theory and the norm of reciprocity to theoretically explain why employees who feel appreciated at work will return this goodwill with increased work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior. We conducted a cross-sectional online survey (N = 183, 53% female) and a two-wave online survey (N = 117, 68.4% female). As expected, perceived appreciation positively affected work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior, and explained unique variance over and above leader-member exchange and perceived organizational support. Positive reciprocity norms moderated the effect of perceived appreciation on work engagement. Perceived appreciation also mediated the positive effect of feedback environment on work engagement and organizational citizenship behavior. Our results imply that perceived appreciation acts as a socioemotional resource which elicits obligations to reciprocate within the employee. The second part of this research challenged the practical recommendations that positive feedback should precede negative feedback in order to soften the blow of the negative feedback that is yet to come and that feedback should always be specific to improve performance. To make specific predictions about the effects of feedback order and feedback specificity, we developed a simple, schematic self-regulatory action cycle based on common theories of self-regulation and models of feedback processing that starts with the feedback message and ends with (potential) performance improvement. We conducted an online experiment (fictitious written feedback, N = 198, 83.3% female) and a laboratory experiment (genuine face-to-face feedback, N = 100, 49% female). The effects of feedback order were as expected: a feedback order negative-positive was perceived more negatively and led to more performance improvement than a feedback order positive-negative. Further, the effect of feedback order on performance improvement was mediated by perceived negativity. Unexpectedly, feedback specificity did not affect performance improvement. Specific feedback in the order negative-positive resulted in the highest performance improvement (interaction between feedback order and feedback specificity). Our results imply that feedback messages should start with negative feedback if the primary objective is to improve employee performance. The third part of this research changed perspective by focusing on the effects of feedback content (i.e. if the feedback to given is positive or negative) on the feedback giver. We expected effects of feedback content on the giver’s experienced effort, affect, and satisfaction because of anticipated face loss, the resulting attempts to mitigate face threats, and empathic reactions of the feedback giver. We conducted a scenario experiment (N = 172; 70% female) in which participants gave positive or negative written feedback. As expected, feedback givers perceived giving negative feedback to be more demanding, less satisfying, and experience less positive and more negative affect after giving negative feedback. Further, a follow-up study (scenario experiment, N = 113, 72% female) provided support for our theoretical assumption of anticipated face threat by showing that feedback recipients judged the feedback giver to be less warm and less competent after receiving negative feedback. These results might explain the reluctance of managers and/or colleagues to give negative feedback. The present studies demonstrate that appreciation and feedback can indeed be effective in boosting employee motivation and performance. However, results also show that concerning feedback, it may be difficult to find a balance between the recipient’s and the giver’s needs. Further, these studies do not provide a final conclusion about whether practical recommendations should generally be accepted or rejected. Future research could focus on the development and dissemination of valid practical recommendations which might contribute to a sustainable improvement of working conditions